Deconstruct
by skrybble
Summary: It's what this girl has done to him. /"'God, Rider, you're a fricking hero now. I've never seen a worse criminal in my life.' Well, maybe, Flynn mused, surprising himself, he was better cut out for this true love thing than he thought."/ Rider x Rapunzel


**Mmhm. I'm jumping on board the ****_Tangled_**** train.**

**So it's not Pixar, and it's not the ****_The Princess and the Frog _(say what you like, but ****it's the best Disney movie I've seen in pretty much forever. The animation is amazing, the characters are perfect... ever see a movie where you really, truly wouldn't change a thing about it? Thought not—Toy Story 3 excluded—but TPatF comes damn close.)**

**But right. Tangled. Really, it's that it has the Snarky One. And if ****_anything _****will sell me on a movie, it's the snarker.**

**Disclaimer: Don't own Tangled.**

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So, being, you know, _Flynn Rider_, he had been pretty sure he knew love inside and out—and ladies, you're all free to read into that as much as you want.

The looks? Hey, get an eyeful, here. Go on, a good, long one; you know you want to. Ridiculously good hair and really, he didn't like to brag or anything, but one helluva smile. That grin had worked on everyone until he'd climbed that goddamned tower, right up till dashing thief meets the wide-eyed blonde who doesn't even classify as the kind of woman he kno—

_Moving on._

Charm. Charm? Oh, he had it. So nobody would call him smart—so big whoop. He'd been doing smart_ass_ for as long as he could remember, and where he came from, that was what got you by, all right? Not please and thank you, educated in science and Latin. He spoke one language, and that was frigging _badass._

Yeah, he just said that. _Badass_. Ten years fluent and counting, folks.

Which brings him to the next point. The name. He had that down. Try sidling up to the set of curves at the bar, announcing, "Hey. I'm Flynn Rider," and _not_ scoring. He's tried—well, not _tried_ the last part, per se, but he has at the very least tested this theory, and it's pretty solid.

That triple threat made him the veritable Casanova in the rings he frequented. Stay a couple nights, break a couple hearts, keep moving with the cash in your pocket. One step closer to the dream, baby. Island. Money. Perfection.

Had he ever mentioned there was no one else on the island? Because that was just how he'd pictured it: him, Flynn Rider. _A-lone._ Nice, right? He'd done his thing with romance, and worked out by now that—while none of the ladies were complaining—this whole true love thing wasn't something he was cut out for.

Well, that made this whole setup even funnier.

He crumpled inward as the knife slid out of him, leaving a burn like ice in its wake. The truth is, heat and cold are all the same once you cranked them up enough, and he was feeling some of both, a fire licking the inside of his ribs and at the same time a dull, numbing realization freezing him in place.

He remembered lurching forward, and he remembered Blondie's scream, and he remembered thinking it was one part nice and nine parts stupid of her to be freaking out like this. Badass, Blondie. I do this every… every… ah, _ow,_ _God-this-hurts-I'm-scared_ EVERY DAY.

He felt all the breath grunt out of him, scraping his throat on the way up, and he crumpled into himself and stumbled forward. With a dull thud, Flynn Ri—no, Eugene Fitzherbert hit the ground. Flynn Rider wasn't the kind of guy who died, and if he was it was still something cool, like ripe old age on his island, or sacrificing himself for the sake of the world.

Except the girl with too much hair who couldn't stop whimpering, half-words dropping, senseless, from her lips… she was his world, wasn't she?

Aw, jeez, he was such a loser. He probably deserved to die a little bit, just for thinking that.

But regardless of any deaths deserved, he'd meant it. It seemed so pathetic to stare across at Rapunzel and not even care any more. It wasn't like he was trying to say that _knife wound going all the way though him_ didn't hurt like hell, but she was there, scared beyond reason, and he was only making it all worse.

Stupid Flynn Rider thinks he's saved the day… but you're not Flynn Rider, are you? You're Eugene Fitzherbert, every stinking syllable head to toe, and you couldn't really pull off something like this if your life depended on it.

Heh, did we mention? It does.

Faintly, through the thudding of blood in his ears, disjointedly loud, he heard her cry out—_no!_—and wondered where she'd gotten that backbone. He was proud of her, he decided, a little bit proud when he wasn't busy occupied with, you know, the pain.

Except then he heard when she said next, and everything went suddenly sharp and all-too-focused. "I'll go with you," said Blondie, staring up at her mother. "I'll go, and I won't fight you, ever, I promise, just _let me save him!_"

"No!" he croaked. "Don't… please, Rapunzel, don't do it!"

_Please_. God, never had he sounded worse. Gone was the charm—and hell, with a hole in his stomach spewing blood, gone were the looks. All he had was… was…

_Damn_, he thought weakly, _she does know my name_.

And then Rapunzel's mother spoke again, and there was the clink of her shackles falling limp against the floor—_no_, he thought, _please, not for me_—but then she was there, above him, her hair falling like sunlight.

"Hold still," she said. "Eugene, just stay still, it won't bleed as much if you—"

He tried to stop it, but as she reached toward him and he raised an arm to fend her off, the pain shook his entire body. He wanted to scream, but screaming would be a kind of agony he knew he couldn't take; instead, he yelped like a kicked frigging puppy and then coughed, tiny, pitiful.

Rapunzel gasped, and he heard her resolution in the next instant, in the way her hands tightened on his. She tried to move his arm, to get to the wound, and he knew it was halfway to lost. "It'll stop in a moment," she said gently. "Just another second, Eugene, I promise."

"No," he croaked. "Rapunzel, I can't let you do this."

"And I can't let you die!" Her voice cracked on the last word, a crack that hit him again like the knife. She shifted his arm off his stomach onto the floor, and he felt his fingernails clink against the jagged piece of glass, and suddenly it was too perfect.

She'd taken his pride, this girl. Here he was, lying on the floor of this godforsaken tower, about to die. He didn't have his charm or looks or even his name to hide behind; he was stripped of everything he'd used to rely on, and he couldn't contest that he was terrified. But any second now, he was about to stop being scared—he was about to stop _being_, period—and she had her whole life ahead of her for the first time ever. It wasn't like he'd had a bad life, really, and he couldn't really have asked for a better last few days that the ones he'd been given, right? But Blondie's life had just started.

True enough that Flynn Rider was the kind of guy who bragged about being able to steal anything.

Well, looked like he was Eugene, then, if he couldn't take that from Rapunzel.

So, "Wait," he whispered and reached up jerkily—pain still didn't cut it, he needed a bigger word—and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck. With a delicacy that came far from naturally to him, he held the fragment of mirror securely away from her skin, getting every strand of that goddamn hair off her neck. She began to move towards him, and he realized he was never even going to get to kiss her.

Good lord, this was one hell of a sacrifice.

"I'm sorry," he said, and just as her lips opened, he jerked his hand upward.

There was a scream—two screams, it might have been, blurring, Blondie and then the hag as she shrieked and lurched towards him and then was suddenly gone.

Blondie hardly seemed to have noticed Gothel's fall. "No," he heard the princess whisper, "no, no, no, _no_!" Two hands pressed hard against his stomach. "Flower gleam and glow," she blurted, "let your power shi—your power shi… sh…"

She broke off with a terrible little sob, and he forced his eyes back open.

"Rapunzel…"

It seemed a miracle she'd heard him at all. "Yes?"

He smiled up at her. He'd won this one—she was going to be okay.

"You are my new dream," he said, his voice holding for a miraculous two seconds, Half of him flinched—you just said that? No, you _really_ just said that?—but the other half knew that he meant it. Painful honesty… what a wonderful thing to be prone to in near-death situations. First telling her _Eugene_, and now this...

She let out a shaking breath. "And you were mine."

_Were_. She knew it was too late, too. Near-death situations… who was he kidding? But all the same, the words filled him with a wonderful lightness. Blondie never lied, right?

_You're happy? Now?_ His subconscious stared at him with a mix of disbelief and pity._ What's she _done_ to you? Godssake, Rider, you're a fricking hero. I've never seen a worse criminal in my life._

It was true, painfully so. _Maybe_, _I'm better cut out for this true love thing than I thought_. He half-laughed, and it hurt more than the coughing.

_Go on. Go out laughing, Rider. Play it off…_

Rapunzel's all right, he told himself, and the thought made him smile as the rest of the world dimmed to black.

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**Yeeeessss, there's a happy ending in the movie. But Rapunzel's last-minute-superpower aside... drama.**

**If you're an animation geek (and ****_oh_****, I am) then do go see ****_Tangled_****, because you'll love it. And if not... well, I pity your inner child (just kidding (****_mostly_****.))**

**Reviews are always amazing!**


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